November 25th, 1998

Is it possible for a human being to forget a word, once it has been imprinted into his or her vocabulary? I tend to mull over this one a lot. Granted, the scientific evidence seems irrefutably on the side of 'yes'. From what I understand of it, the brain works by means of electrochemical processes which dictate the neural pattern of our thoughts and ideas. As the neurons fire, we experience creative bursts of inspiration. Yet by the same token, these moments of inspiration are never kept intact for long; and as the neurons decay, so too do the ideas in our minds. Given the irrefutable conclusion to that question, I now pose another: is it possible for the collective human race to forget an idea? The answer is more deceptive in this case.

Nietzsche, at the height of his philosophical glory, believed that once an idea left the privacy of the individual and became the domain of the community, it was essentially lost. In more recent times, this theory has been carried to its extremes by mimetic research - a type of theory which postulates the existence of ideational diseases, or 'memes'. Such memes - religion being one of my favorite examples - lose their value once they make the transition from individual beliefs to group beliefs. And don't think that I'm kidding. According to psychiatrist Mark Fabi, mind viruses include things like 'popular fads, jokes, rumors, cults, chain letters� in a sense, the message is the virus, only instead of infecting the computer, it infects the user; he believes it, then spreads it himself.' This kind of terminology compliments Nietzsche's negative portrayal of the collective.

Going back to the topic at hand, I personally believe it is almost impossible to remove a concept from language once assimilated. For better or worse, it means that while the labels of 'modernism' and 'feminism' are likely to one day disappear, the actual values that they spread will continue in some other form. We are essentially a regurgitating race; and as such, all our trappings remain the possession of the greater whole.

Note I said 'almost impossible'. The trend might not be unbreakable. Bruce Johnson, one of my lecturers at UNSW, posits the role of 'post-humanist' ideology in the future as a means of wiping clean the slate of human vocabulary. Historically, all the knowledge that we have accumulated up to this point demonstrates the egocentric position of Man. To put it mildly, we have been at the center of everything we have ever done. But professor Johnson argues that there are signs of a gradual post-humanist approach. Environmentalism, while certainly catering to human needs, might very well one day seek to protect the environment for its own sake. I'm not an environmentalist, so I can't really say if they've reached that stage yet - for all I know, they might still be motivated by the 'future legacy of our children' and 'our need to breathe' - but I also agree with Bruce in that the potential for post-humanist thinking might exist somewhere in there as well. Similarly, interest in the universe and similar phenomena can be taken as far-reaching expansions of post-humanist thinking; after all, moons and black holes and big bangs have little to do with the grand narrative of human life. If anything, the continual search for alien life would reduce our species' superiority to the level of a second-class United Nations member.

Of course, one can't forget the role of science back on earth: cloning, if done correctly, might very well reduce the human gene to just another form of a complicated fax machine. Post-humanist thinking, indeed. And I also can't help but have a sneaking suspicion that our good friend Nietzsche might have approved of Kevorkian's fight to reclaim death from the province of the law, the public, the collective - straight back into the hands of the individual.